Image of the Day: Colorful Colonoids

Organoids grown from a mouse’s colon will be used to screen drugs for colorectal cancer.

Chia-Yi Hou

Apr 18, 2019

Mouse-derived colonoids, which are organoids grown from the colon, with actin phalloidin stained red and DNA stained turquoise. Scale bar is 50 μm.

VIOLA LOBERT

In an effort to develop a laboratory tool to study tumor suppressors in colorectal cancer, Viola Lobert of Oslo University Hospital and her team have successfully created organoids grown from the colon of a mouse.

“Organoids are suited for high-throughput screening due to their small size, and importantly can be grown from patient biopsies,” Lobert says in an email to The Scientist. “Perhaps the most exciting aspect is that testing compounds on patient-derived organoids predicts patient response, avoiding the need for xenografts.”